Through their open defiance, women like Harriet Tubman and
Sojourner Truth had a significant impact on the institution of
slavery. But what of the millions of other women who did not commit
public or even private acts of resistance? Are their stories worthy
of our attention? While some scholars imply that only the struggle
for freedom was legitimate, Jenny Sharpe complicates the linear
narrative -- from slavery to freedom and literacy -- that emerged
from the privileging of autobiographical accounts like that of
Frederick Douglass. She challenges a paradigm that equates agency
with resistance and self-determination, and introduces new ways to
examine negotiations for power within the constraints of slavery.
In Ghosts of Slavery, Sharpe introduces a wider range of
everyday practices by examining the lives of three distinctive
Caribbean women: a maroon leader, a mulatto concubine, and a
fugitive slave. Through them she explains how the diasporic
experience of slavery enabled black women to claim an authority
that they didn't possess in Africa; how concubines empowered
themselves through their mimicry of white women; and how
less-privileged slave women manipulated situations that they were
powerless to change. Finding the highly mediated portrayal of slave
women in the historical records limited and sometimes misleading,
Sharpe turns to unconventional sources for investigating these
women's lives. In this fascinating and historically rich account,
she calls for new strategies of reading that question traditional
narratives of history, and she finds alternative ways to integrate
oral storytelling, slave songs, travel writing, court documents,
proslavery literature, and contemporaryliterature into black
history.
Ultimately, this layered approach not only produces a more
complex picture of the slave women's agency than conventional
readings, it encourages a more nuanced understanding of the roles
of slaves in the history of slavery.
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